


Universal Constants

by astra (hauntedpunk)



Category: Steam Powered Giraffe, The Vice Quadrant - Steam Powered Giraffe (Album)
Genre: M/M, he sees alternate universes so cosmo is also Kind Of There, idk what tag for rav to use ever, its all from rav's point of view and cosmo isnt technically present but, mostly an excuse to write some potential au outlines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-14 21:29:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9204047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hauntedpunk/pseuds/astra
Summary: The top of the stairs opens up into a pitch black room, lit by a glowing ether of stars. The platform at the top is big enough for one person to stand and lean over a strange, luminescent, metal ball that seems to murmur. Thousands of voices are packed in there, whispering in a thousand different universes.He reaches out, thinks 'Let me see the commander’s destiny', and presses his hand to it.A current of electricity runs through his body, and the whole world collapses in on him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> SO ! Here we have yet another unbeta'd, mostly unedited ravcosmo that wouldn't leave my brain alone. In a follow up fic I might actually do short one-shots about a few of the alternate universes mentioned? Really depends on what I'm feeling/the feedback I get! 
> 
> On that note - I noticed some of you guys bookmarked/left kudos on my last r/c fic!! I appreciate it SO MUCH + I'm really serious about wanting to talk to you guys about these two!! I'm always curious about other fan's interpretations of them, and since the fandom is so small, I figure we've all gotta network, y'know? 
> 
> I found out some cool new information about Rav + Cosmo thanks to Bunny's SPG Lore reddit thread, so expect more fics with the premises that she talked about there!!
> 
> Anyway - enjoy ! ;000

This part of the planet is dark and quiet. 

It’s a rather purple planet, like the color of eggplant and ripe grapes. The place has been abandoned for centuries, though it ticks with a sort of elegance that Rav knows can be attributed to its keeper. Jumbo, the Guardian of Time, owns the sector. It’s where he keeps track of every known event in the multiverse. 

It’s the perfect place to find out how to save the commander. 

“Nice ‘n easy,” Rav says to himself as he lands the Alexander on the desolate ground. 

The palace is a huge, sprawling thing, with a door nearly forty meters tall. The sky is starless, and Jumbo is nowhere to be seen. 

“Alright, I’ll be back in a few hours,” he tells Gidget as he loads up his bag. “Reliable sources tell me that Jumbo is in the Vice Quadrant for a few days visiting family.”

“Be careful, Rav,” Gidget says knowingly. “You do not know what you are going to find in there.”

Rav straightens up and hooks his bag over his shoulder before pulling his mask up.

“I’m going to find a way to save Peter,” he says. “You never knew him. He’d do the same for me.”

Without giving Gidget time to try to disprove his plan, he opens the hatch and hurries out onto the cold ground. 

Inside the palace he’s met with a set of sprawling stairs, flight after flight climbing higher into the unknown. His flashlight seems to reach nowhere, disappearing into the ink-like black all around hims as he looks up.

“Well, I guess I’d better start,” he whispers to himself.

It echoes damply into the void as he begins to climb.

Time goes flat and strange on Jumbo’s planet. He climbs for what feels like hours, but also a few minutes, but at the same time, he can’t quite seem to recall his last conversation with Gidget. Units of time twirl and slip through his grasp, mind going fuzzy. 

The top of the stairs opens up into a pitch black room, lit by a glowing ether of stars. The platform at the top is big enough for one person to stand and lean over a strange, luminescent, metal ball that seems to murmur. Thousands of voices are packed in there, whispering in a thousand different universes. 

He reaches out, thinks Let me see the commander’s destiny, and presses his hand to it.

A current of electricity runs through his body, and the whole world collapses in on him.

~

In a few universes, they never meet.

Rav never goes to Earth to work with the space militia, Peter never intercepts the Alexander after being hit by the blue matter, and they never lay eyes on each other. Faint whispers of a hero called ‘Cosmo’ find their way through the galaxy to Starburner’s crew - they shrug it off as an irrelevant blip in the cosmic radar. Their thousands of years together unravel in one fell swoop.

In another universe, Rav watches himself fall madly, deeply in love with Peter as the commander finds a way to make Holly live forever. The married couple find solace in each other for hundreds of years as Rav watches from the sidelines, throwing himself into his work. They become known throughout the galaxy as a crime-fighting duo. Rav never tells Cosmo he loves him, and Cosmo never lets him down.

In many universes, Peter never becomes Cosmo. His life flashes before Rav’s in what feels like mere moments. They are nothing more than acquaintances from the Earth days with the militia. Sometimes Rav attends the wedding between him and Holly and hangs out with the Walter robots, sipping champagne and humming under his breath; sometimes he doesn’t spare him a second thought.

In some of these universes, Peter is happier than Rav ever sees him elsewhere. He lives out his life in the manor with his beautiful wife and his son and his bots and never knows the hardship that could have come to him. In some, however, Rav has never seen Peter sadder. He falls into a deep depression muttering about missed opportunities and the failure of the human race. Sometimes Holly leaves him. Sometimes she doesn’t. 

Rav watches on.

In some universes, Peter never meets Holly. She is never his high school sweetheart and he never kisses her under the bleachers and takes her back home to meet his family of automatons. In a few of these universes, he lives alone. Sometimes he becomes Cosmo, sometimes he doesn’t. In the ones where he doesn’t become the commander, where he doesn’t have Holly to tie him to humanity, Peter’s red matter core swallows him whole, and he unleashes hell across the galaxy.

Alternatively, in some of these universes, Rav watches he and Peter fall in love. Oftentimes, Rav is the only tie to mortality that Cosmo needs to be okay. They live out their lives and explore the universe, growing older and happier by the decade. 

Those are a few of Rav’s favorite universes.

Some universes boast Rav’s favorite timeline, the one he wished for so long to happen. Cosmo never leaves his crew’s ship and never goes back to Earth. He never saves the flight engineer or his planet and Holly mourns his death, as Peter and Rav explore the multiverse together. It’s selfish and it ruins lives, but Rav soaks in the adventures the pair go on in this timeline like nothing else.

In a surprising amount of universes, Rav is pleased to note, their lives look an awful lot like the ones they have now. And in these universes, more often than not, he and Peter fall in love and are happier than he ever thought imaginable. It usually takes centuries after they meet for one of them to cave and say, “I love you, I need you, please don’t ever leave me”. 

In some of those universes, it’s Rav who realizes it first. In some, it’s the commander who realizes that they need each other.

In a few uniquely bizarre universes, Rav lives on Earth at the same time Peter does. They grow up together and climb trees as children and court girls as teenagers and catch drive in movies on the weekends, swearing with crossed fingers that they love the women in their life, that there’s no one else they would rather spend their lives with. This era on Earth is a different time where there’s secrecy in true love between two men, Rav realizes with disgust. In these universes, sometimes they share stolen kisses in the secrecy of their own homes. In some, neither mention their affection, taking it to the grave.

Some universes are simpler than others. 

Rav watches universe after universe where the Necrostar never coils its way through the galaxy, dooming planets to lives of suffering. Sometimes Earth is just Earth, Peter A. Walter IV is just Peter A. Walter IV, and Ravaxis Starburner is just a poor descendent of a famous gunman living alone in the south. Sometimes Rav is just Starburner, galactic smuggler, crime-fighter, and star-destroyer. Sometimes Commander Cosmo is just cosmic heartthrob and superhero. Sometimes they’re just people, and nothing much happens, and Rav can’t decide whether these universes upset him more than the ones that scare him shitless.

Some universes are more complex than others. 

Occasionally Peter’s red matter leaks through him and Commander Cosmo turns on Earth, attacking ferociously, decimating billions. Sometimes he is like the Astronaut - sad, and lonely, and with his newfound powers, wreaking havoc across the galaxy. In a few of these universes Cosmica is there. Sometimes they’re in love, and sometimes she’s the Earth’s protector. 

The universe that scares Rav the most though, is one he knows as the most unrealistic. He knows it isn’t his Peter who says those things and then leaves, who starts fights he can’t finish, who argues with Rav. He knows it isn’t himself who fights back just as bitterly. He knows this isn’t the real them who hurt each other with their words. But still, it’s a universe, and it happens in some far off place that isn’t his own.

Thankfully, this universe is rare, and he sees only one. It seems to be a near-universal truth that Peter and Rav respect and care for each other if they know one another. 

In an almost as equally frightening universe, Rav kills Peter.

Well, it isn’t really Peter - it’s the Necrostar’s corrupted version of him, oozing red matter and glowing an unearthly luminescent green. He doesn’t see the small, blue matter bomb launched from Rav’s ship, or expect the plasma-whip around his throat as it detonates. He definitely doesn’t see Rav standing over his body, wracked with sobs, whispering, “Why’d you do it, Peter?” under his breath.

Rav almost tears himself away from the viewing platform when he sees this. 

The sweetest universe is the one where Rav is a prince on a far-off moon, and Peter is his betrothed, and they spend afternoons in flower fields writing poetry and nights in the castle behind closed doors. Everything is soft and blue and Rav can practically taste the honey of it all.

Sometimes the universes are really, truly out there. They might be in an Earth band, or actors on a planet’s media circuit, or engineers for the space militia. In one, Cosmica falls in love with both Cosmo and Rav, and they’re the power-relationship of the galaxy. Rav laughs at that one despite it all. In other universes they live in different time periods - sometimes vastly in the future, sometimes vastly in the past. Sometimes Rav never becomes an interdimensional pilot and dies at a normal age on his home planet. Sometimes he never helps W.I.N.K. contact the Walter bots, and the green apple is never found. 

In a few universes Cosmo is nothing more than one of Rav’s many conquests. A night of whispered urgency and blue lights, a morning of too-sweet words, and Rav never hears from him again.

Rav watches their wedding in one universe with stars in his eyes. Peter wears a suit and there are floating lights lining the benches and their friends are all there. Sometimes when he blinks, Peter is human again, and when he looks again, he’s Commander Cosmo. It doesn’t matter; the loving look he gives Rav when he hears “You may now kiss the groom” never changes. 

In another universe they’re married on the Alexander, by Gidget, and Rav wears Cosmo’s dress-shirt and Cosmo wears his space-suit, and they kiss before the fight with the Necrostar. They both cry in this universe, and wish each other luck before their potential last moments with one another. 

In yet another universe, they’re married on a drunken night on a moon known for its gambling and alcohol and bad decision making. Rav awakes the next morning with a cheap ring on his finger and hickeys on his neck. Sometimes he and Cosmo annul the marriage. Sometimes they don’t. 

Universes speed around him, flashing in front of him, behind him, from all sides. They dance and meander and twine through his very being, soaking him with the knowledge of what could have been and what never was. The platform feels far gone beneath his feet. He is a million light years tall, void of a physical body.

There’s a sudden - BOOM! CRASH! and the distinct rumbling that Rav knows all too well. He yanks himself out of the multiverse and the vibrant universes dissolve around him. The room is still dark and starry. He kneels and shrugs off his bag, shoving the glowing brass machine into it. A million twisting stairs lead him back down to the entrance to the deserted palace where the Alexander awaits. He sprints across the ground, steps echoing, and throws himself into the ship wordlessly.

They barely escape before Jumbo swoops down to the planet’s surface, booming voice resonating through the atmosphere. It isn’t until he is light years from the planet, still breathing heavily, that he allows himself a moment to think. 

“Did you find out how to save your commander?” Gidget asks, tilting their head curiously. 

Rav blinks and stares at the stars shooting by the ship’s window. 

“No,” he says hollowly. “I - I must’ve missed it. Must’ve looked over that part of our story - “

He cuts himself off and tightens his grip on the controls, trying to keep his breathing steady. 

“Did you find anything of use to the mission?”

For a long moment, Rav stays quiet, watching the passing cosmos with a sense of detachment. Memories of lives past, present, and current fog his mind. He can feel his heart aching. 

He nods slowly. “I found out that in every universe, the commander is supposed to live past this. He never dies in the Necrostar. And that’s enough for me.”

Gidget nods uncertainly and goes back to their calculations. As well-intentioned as the robot is, Rav knows they never fully understand mortal interactions and thought processes.

Rav keeps it to himself, under lock and key in his mind, that he now knows that Cosmo is most likely going to be happy after this. If Rav can help him become happy again, to rediscover his powers the way he did all those centuries ago - well, then it would be worth every moment of searching he’s done. Maybe it’s selfish, but the thought that Peter may have a future out there with Rav urges the pilot on even more. 

_No matter what happens_ , he thinks. _I’d still cross the multiverse to find you, Peter._

____The SS Alexander streaks blue across the black vacuum, heading into the inevitable future._ _ _ _

**Author's Note:**

> as always, feel free to hit me up @ravcosmo or @qpid on tumblr !!! ;+)


End file.
